n her voice. "I was a child, taken out
of a country convent, and married as ignorantly as a bird is trapped. I
had rank, and I was burdened by it. I was in a great world, a great
court, and I was terrified by them. The man I had been given to was a
gambler, a drunkard, and a brute. He treated me in private as he had
treated the women captured in Turkestan or sold as slaves in Persia. You
knew that: you were his intimate associate. You used your opportunities
to interest me and win your way into my confidence. I had no one in the
whole world that I could trust. I did trust you."

She pauses a moment.

Gervase does not dare reply.

"You were so gentle, so considerate, so full of sympathy; I thought you
a very angel. A girl of sixteen or seventeen sees the face of St. John
in the first Faust who finds his way into her shut soul! You made me
care for you; I do not deny it. But why did I care? Because I saw in you
the image of a thousand things you were not. Because I imagined that my
own fanciful ideal existed in you, and you had the ability to foster the
illusion."

"But why recall all this?" he says, entreatingly. "Perhaps I was
unworthy of your innocent attachment, of your exalted imaginations; I
dare not say that I was not; but now that I meet you again, now that I
care for you ten thousand--ten million times more----"

"What is that to me?" she says, with almost insolent coldness. "It was
not I who loved you, but a child who knew no better, and whose heart was
so bleeding from the tortures of another man that the first hand which
soothed it could take it as one takes a wounded bird! But when my eyes
opened to your drift and your desires, when I saw that you were no
better than other men, that you tried to tempt me to the lowest forms of
intrigue under cover of your friendship with my husband, then, child
though I was, I saw you as you were, and I hid myself from you! You
thought that Sabaroff exiled me from his jealousy of you to the northern
estates; but it was not so. I entreated him to let me leave Petersburg,
and he had grown tired of torturing me and let me go."

"You blame me for being merely human. I loved you not better but not
worse than men do love."

"I blame you for having been insincere, treacherous, dishonest. You
approached me under cover of the most delicate and forbearing sympathy
and reverence, and you only wore those masks to cover the vulgar designs
of a most commonplace Lothario. Of course,